Swept Up
by Stealth Noodle
Summary: FFI  One of Matoya's unlucky brooms seeks revenge.


**Title:** Swept Up  
><strong>Rating:<strong> PG  
><strong>Wordcount:<strong> 1311  
><strong>Summary: <strong>One of Matoya's unlucky brooms seeks revenge.

**Note:**Written for the November round of FFEX's Chocobo Down challenge, for **ovo_lexa**'s prompt: "It turns out (for the purpose of this prompt/fic, anyway) that those brooms ain't just mystical talking brooms. They used to be people! D: Explore! :D"

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><p>When the candles go out, she drags one bristle carefully through the dust of an undisturbed corner. This is how she knows that it has been three weeks and two days since she became a broom. Someday the witch will notice the filth building up and order it swept clean, and then she will lose time as well as self.<p>

She had a name once, and a body that wasn't a broom. Fingers, skin, a sound that perhaps began with a "T" or a "D"—she doesn't know anything else about these now except that they are lost.

When she tries to remember herself before, she hears a scratching hum like straw against a stone floor and sees layers of wispy white like cobwebs. Sometimes she thinks that perhaps there was no before; perhaps she's not a thing that became a broom, but a broom that went mad.

The candlelight turns to smoke, and she has been a broom for three weeks and three days.

As she scratches time into the dust, she sees something strange in the darkness just outside the cave's entrance, shaped like neither a broom nor a witch. Her bristles scrape the floor as she sweeps toward it. "What are you?" she asks, but her voice comes out wrong, as it always has. As it has for three weeks and three days.

The shadow hisses at her.

"You shouldn't be here," she tells it, and hears the garbled reflection of her words.

The shadow raises a clawed hand, whispering half-familiar syllables. Something inside her untangles into a straight channel. Stagnant thoughts first drip, then pour into it, until they flow strong and smooth. A broom should not be able to speak, she realizes; if she has a voice, she must be more than mad.

"The witch did this to me." Sound reinforces thought, echoing without distortion. "She caught me stealing. I was so close—"

The shadow raises a finger to its lips, and she sees now that it is a man with wild hair, impossibly gangling limbs, and skin like a poisonous frog's. A dark elf. A current of recognition speeds her thoughts, and a shiver runs through her, all wrong, shaking bristles instead of raising gooseflesh.

"How did she catch you?" he whispers.

Revulsion colors her tone. "I know what you are. You're a dark elf."

"And you're a _broom_."

"I was an elf." The memory throbs inside her as if she has a narrow heart embedded in her handle. "My name was Talia. All I had to do was bring back the scales, and they promised—"

More hissing. "I restored your mind to answer my questions, not to babble at me."

She remembers fingers, and how it felt to curl them around the scales of long-dead dragons, still sharp enough to dig into her flesh. A pocketful for the mages, and a pocketful for her: she wasn't even greedy. Just a blind old witch, they had told her. She wonders now if they knew all along that the witch carries an unblinking eye in her palm.

"How did she catch you?" the dark elf asks again. "What alerts her to trespassers? Speak, pitiful thief!"

She swings herself and smacks one of his horns with her handle, not quite loudly enough to carry over the constant white noise of sweeping. "Why should I aid you, you vile thing?"

"I could free you," he replies. "Or would you prefer to remain a broom forever?"

No offer so hastily made can possibly be in earnest. She has always been a little too trusting, but she is no longer a fool. "Do not lie to me. What have you come here to steal?"

He studies her, eyes gleaming silver-black in the dark. "Books." His resentment rides out on a drawl. "I doubt you'd understand their value."

She has never cared for books. "If you want my aid," she says, "you will steal her crystal eye, as well. She took my body; I will take her sight."

His lips curl back from sharp teeth, and she sweeps the dirt around him to muffle the sound of his laugh.

* * *

><p>Her bristles gather in two clumps, in memory of legs. Inside her handle beats the memory of a heart. All around her, brooms sweep incessantly, mindlessly, a lullaby for the witch.<p>

The dark elf follows her in a careful dance past the wards in the doorway and the trick stones in the floor, letting her shield him as they pass the other brooms. She remembers everything now, the fear and the exhilaration and the smug carelessness when she thought she was clear of any traps. The dragon scales are still in the same jar on the shelf, tucked between faintly glowing eggs and a little box of bones.

"The crystal eye first," she whispers, scratching a safe path to the witch's bed. The dark elf flashes his fangs but follows.

One wild move, one cry of alarm, and all the brooms would sing down the dark elf's end. The thought warms her as she leans over the wooden table at the witch's bedside, where the crystal eye gleams in the dull light of the stranger potion ingredients. The witch snores.

At the inclination of her handle, the dark elf extends a clawed hand. She would hold her breath, if she still had breath to hold. The near-silent scrape of a talon against the glass elicits a rustle and a snore; the dark elf holds still as a stone, smooth as a shadow until the witch is quiet again.

With a flick of his wrist, the eye vanishes. The witch is blind.

Cautiously, inch by inch, they retreat. When they reach a space less thick with brooms, she tips toward his ear and says, "Now leave."

His snarl startles a nearby broom, but she sweeps reassuringly until it calms.

"Take the eye and go," she whispers. "It's probably worth more than whatever books you wanted, which is more than you deserve."

He is not foolish enough to snarl twice, but his voice is thick with contempt. "Do you mean to use the great Astos, you pathetic piece of kindling?"

The memory of her shrug has no anatomy to express itself. "This is the deal. If you don't care for it, will you complain to the witch?"

He hisses, "Have you forgotten so quickly what it was to be mindless? I can easily take back what I grant."

"As if you didn't already intend to. Don't take me for a fool." Even dread is almost sweet; she feels it like cold blood in the ghosts of veins. "I know what you are, and I won't aid you further. If I didn't want the eye gone from here, I'd already have given you over to the witch."

His teeth catch the faint light. "What is to stop me from taking what I please? Perhaps you have lied about the traps, as well."

"Find out," she replies.

He blinks.

When she sweeps a path toward the mouth of the cave, he follows like an angry cat. She tries to trap memories indiscriminately, like debris in her bristles: a name, fear, pricked flesh, the bittersweet taste of something like triumph. She just wants something, some flicker of satisfaction, when the witch wakes and cannot escape the darkness.

The dark elf slips out to the safety of the grass, where the moon silvers his bare skin. "You won't enjoy your revenge," he spits, no longer bothering to whisper. "You won't remember it."

All she can do is drag everything down with her as she tangles.

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><p>She has been a broom for three weeks and three days. Perhaps she was something else before; she wonders, sometimes, whether she has forgotten something important.<p>

Sometimes she thinks that it has been three weeks and three days for a very long time.


End file.
